Under a Rock,
Along the Shore

form & concept | November 2022

under a rock, along the shore is a group exhibition featuring works from photographers who blur the lines between image, object, land and body. Through contemporary photographic experimentation, an international array of artists interrogates the complex legacy of the landscape genre.

Since 1826, the world has sought communion with the natural world through the discrete container of a photograph. By the mid-19th century, photographers were masterfully crafting real-life versions of Hudson River School paintings on celluloid, allowing for the public to hold vast American vistas for the first time. This marvelous technical and artistic tool proved to be a double-edged sword: notions of the sublime melded with violent colonial ideas of possessing the land. As the medium provided greater access to natural beauty, it also flattened physical, cultural and political dimensions of the world.

under a rock, along the shore explores the complicated relationship between human, land and camera. The show’s photographs and objects evoke the experience of moving through and interacting with the high desert mesas and fertile valleys of the Desert Southwest, where most of these artists reside.

A suspended cyanotype quilt references New Mexico’s ancient oceanic past as Norteña artist Maryssa Chavez sews prints together into a living family archive based in her paternal grandfather’s attachment to the idea. This intertwined exploration of geographic and photographic history is continued through Stefan Jennings Batista’s albumen prints and cliché verre smoke prints by Daniel Hojnacki.

The works of Dakota Mace and Justin Guthrie offer views of the Southwest that are rooted in their individual experiences of Indigeneity through embodied photographs. The saguaro portraits of David Emitt Adams feature Sonoran vistas shrunk down to the size of a can, while satin prints by Emily Margarit Mason literally reconstruct landscape through imagery of assemblages. Rinko Kawauchi expounds on the ephemerality of local ecologies through work from her Ametsuchi series, offering elegant and subversive perspectives on land use.

Will Wilson's ambitious ongoing project Connecting the Dots reckons with the deleterious, enduring effects of uranium mining on and around Navajo Nation (Dinetah). Grounded in a photographic survey documenting the over five hundred abandoned uranium mines (AUM) in the region, this series illuminates the existence of AUMs — sometimes mere miles away from famous landmarks such as Monument Valley and Shiprock — to ultimately explore possibilities of remediation. Wilson’s wall installation in under a rock, along the shore pieces together a selection of the artist's drone-shot images, creating a visual map that opens doors for understanding and contending with the legacy of mining, among other forms of harmful land use, on tribal soil.

“Though practices may vary, under a rock, along the shore features images that utilize the process of photography as a way of seeking connection to land and place,” says Gallery Director Jordan Eddy. “Throughout the show, artworks emerge from the wall to engage in revelatory theater with the viewer.”

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